Katalin Gallyas is Vice Chair of the Connected Smart Cities Network Board, which oversees the OASC initiative, and the Board’s contact to OASC NL. She is also Open Innovation Manager at the CTO Office in the City of Amsterdam. Reporting from the signing, she says:

“We are really proud to announce this step as all six cities are very keen to move towards smart interoperable open data-based solutions. I am very inspired to see this unique collaboration where we can, for the first time, openly discuss the pros and cons of some open data platforms dashboards, and we’ll push forward the smartest solutions.”

“It is not only about procuring smartly when it comes to open / big data-based solutions, but also to make sure we are not missing the market velocity when it comes to open data-based city ‘steering’,” says Gallyas.

National events and collaboration

The Dutch cities are meeting bi-monthly and have a technical secretary, hosted by the CTO Office in the City of Amsterdam.

The ambition is to promote the ‘intelligence unit’ features of this national collaborative network, and to set up very concrete collaboration projects between the participating cities, applying for common open data funds on a larger scale.

National open data-related events and capacity building via MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) will be facilitated in and driven by this network.

Next meeting in OASC NL is June 25 in Utrecht, at 10-12 am.

OASC members and topics will be part of national Open Data and IoT conferences such as the CIO conference in November 2015.

Soon a collaboration website will be launched to generate common project and concrete milestones.

“We really look forward to take the first harmonised open data steps between the OASC NL member cities,” says Katalin Gallyas.